Features:
Source Project Roundup, May 13
Interactive features, data journalism, and best practices
Here’s a few things we loved recently: Walmart cops, arresting words, how landfills fill in Minnesota, how housing stays empty in China, and more.
Arresting Words
(Boston Globe, April 10, 2016)
Explore the words, emotions, and life-changing moments captured in the Boston PD’s arrest records.
Taken one by one, those outbursts, explanations, and pleas reveal moments that go far beyond the rare — and too often deadly — confrontations that have rightly commanded immense public attention. Together, they show what ails great swaths of the city: Mental illness, domestic violence, poverty, addiction, pig-headedness, hatred — the cracks in Boston’s handsome edifice, through which some of us are lost.
Tampa Bay Walmarts Get Thousands of Police Calls. You Paid the Bill.
(Tampa Bay Times, May 11, 2016)
This in-depth investigation found that Walmart made 16,800 calls to Tampa Bay police. Body cam footage shows what it’s like to be a cop responding to these calls. Plus, here’s the AMA.
See How the Opposing Party has Gained Ground Under Every President Since Truman
(Washington Post, May, 9, 2016)
As a presidential election appears to be breaking all the rules, here’s a series of charts that explains what hasn’t changed.
An incumbent president’s political party tends to lose ground in Congress and on the state level during their tenure. And President Obama’s is no exception, losing the most ground.
What Minnesotans are throwing away, but could be recycling
(Star Tribune, April 21, 2016)
Minnesota maintains detailed, comprehensive data about what gets thrown away. The Star Tribune uses this cache of information to understand how recycling is (and isn’t) working.
How Corporate Boards Connect, in Charts
(Harvard Business Review, April 21, 2016)
A node chart makes sense of global networks by showing a “nest” of formerly interconnected regional links, now stretched across the globe.
China’s Real Estate Conundrum: The Big Property Bubble vs. Ghost Towns
(International Business Times, April 19 2016)
A data-heavy look at how China’s real-estate woes began, what’s happening now, and what might be next.
”A lot of what was built in recent years is the wrong thing in the wrong place.”
Even More Things
Quartz’s Atlas is now a platform, for anyone’s charting needs.
Atlas is becoming an open platform because we think it has potential to become the world’s largest repository of user-generated charts and data. Imagine a network of people who work with data every day, sharing it all with each other and the rest of the world.
What happens when mathematicians crack into the narrative and characters of Game of Thrones…. What happens when you just Google it.
Help build this list of academic research and reports on the impact of surveillance on journalism.
How collecting news apps into a toolbox keeps them from disappearing.
What online communities and crops have in common.
Here at OpenNews, we’re getting ready for SRCCON, in Portland July 28 and 29. Are you coming with us? A few details:
- Scholarship applications close May 18th. We’re offering a limited number of travel scholarships to make getting to SRCCON easier.
- The ticket lottery opens May 18th. Register for the ticket lottery until May 24. The lottery is a new system we’re trying this year, to make ticket distribution more equitable.
- Free childcare is available throughout SRCCON.
On our last community call, we learned about sensor journalism, with Piyush Aggarwal from the Hindustan Times, and more. (Call notes.) Our next call is May 19 at noon ET. See you there.
